1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of the automated searching and indexing of published information.
2. Description of the Related Art
In today's world, information is available everywhere. Historically, periods of time involving rapid and/or significant advancements in a particular area are typically dubbed with a moniker that describes the advancement. Past examples include the “industrial revolution” and the “space age”. Today, people describe the current era as the “information age” because never before in the history of mankind has there been more information more easily available to more people.
With this amazing and wonderful access to information comes a significant problem: how to keep track of all of the information available and how to focus in on only the information of interest. In fields such as engineering and medicine, keeping apprised of the latest literature is mandatory for success, yet “information overload” can severely limit the ability of one to do so.
Studies have shown that clinicians generally have only approximately 3–4 hours per week to digest key information. Consequently clinicians cannot review all published information sources but must limit their reading to key items. Checklists have been developed to help quantify the process of assessing scientific information, however, while such checklists are helpful, they still have been hampered by important limitations. These include a lack of applicability to a broad range of resource types, methods that are time-consuming and not optimized based on actual user input, cumbersome definitions and interpretive techniques, and they provide results that do not reflect the actual findings of practicing clinicians.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have an automated system that ranks scientific information in a way that reflects the selection and reading processes of the reader.